A Former NFL Linebacker Racked Up Arrests for Nine Years and ICE Ended His Run

ICE tracked down a former NFL linebacker who had been dodging deportation for nine years.

His arrest record finally caught up with him under a law written after a nursing student was murdered.

Now the NFL's strangest recruiting experiment has ended exactly the way ICE ends everything these days.

A Rugby Convert Who Never Got His Visa Right

Daniel Ogama Adongo came to America as an experiment.

The Indianapolis Colts signed the Kenyan rugby standout in 2013 after he built a reputation playing professional rugby in New Zealand.

NFL scouts were chasing the international rugby-to-football pipeline that decade, hoping raw size could be coached into technique.

It didn't last.

Adongo played two seasons on special teams before the Colts released him in 2015.

His visa expired the following year – and he simply never left.

What followed was nearly a decade of run ins with Indiana police.

Records show arrests for felony intimidation, battery and disorderly conduct.

A 2020 conviction for criminal mischief cost him 364 days behind bars.

An immigration judge finally ordered his removal in March, and ICE Chicago carried it out on June 20.

ICE Chicago Assistant Field Office Director Douglas Thompson didn't mince words about the man his agency just put on a plane, calling Adongo "clearly a threat to the community" now that he's gone.

Adongo Joins a Growing List of Athletes ICE Sent Home

Adongo isn't the only professional athlete Trump's deportation machine has caught up with this year.

Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr. was deported last summer after ICE said he overstayed his visa and lied on a green card application.

Syracuse basketball player John Bol Ajak was ordered removed to Sudan in May after more than a month in ICE custody.

Nineteen year old Honduran soccer player Emerson Colindres was picked up and ordered deported back in 2025.

The activist media keeps running the same play on every one of these stories.

They insist these athletes were swept up despite having no real criminal record.

That framing skips past the obvious point – illegal entry has victims of its own, whether or not the rap sheet backs it up.

The Law Named After a Murdered Nursing Student

Adongo's most recent charges fell under the Laken Riley Act, a law Trump signed in January 2025.

It requires ICE to detain illegal aliens without bond once they're arrested for crimes like theft, burglary or assault.

Laken Riley was a 22 year old nursing student killed by an illegal immigrant who'd already racked up a shoplifting arrest and walked free anyway – Congress named the law after her.

That's the gap the law was built to close, and Adongo walked straight into it.

ICE agents rounded up more than 1,030 illegal aliens with criminal records in a single operation named for Laken Riley late last year.

What Nine Years of Leniency Actually Cost America

Illegal immigration was never free, and the receipts prove it.

A 2024 House Budget Committee report found that every illegal immigrant costs taxpayers roughly $68,000 more over a lifetime than they pay in.

That same report found that 59 percent of households led by an illegal immigrant lean on at least one major welfare program to get by.

Add it up, by the report's own math, and illegal immigrants pull in an estimated $42 billion a year in benefits.

None of that shows up in the sympathetic profiles written about deported athletes.

Nobody writes a sympathetic profile about the family priced out of a starter home while the Federal Reserve links surging housing costs to unchecked immigration.

Nobody writes one about the taxpayer covering the roughly $7 billion a year in emergency room bills illegal immigration piles up nationwide.

ICE has now removed more than 356,000 people in fiscal year 2026 alone, and the agency says close to seven in ten of its arrests involve someone already facing a criminal charge or conviction.

ICE is currently holding more than 65,000 people in detention, and six out of every ten carry a criminal record.

Add up the removals and the self-deportations, and more than three million people without legal status have left the country since Trump took office.

Adongo got nine years, a Colts jersey and a rap sheet out of America before the bill finally came due.

Most Americans working overtime to cover housing, groceries and overcrowded schools don't get nine years of patience from this country.

ICE just proved the clock never stops running, no matter what jersey you used to wear.

Sources:

• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, "ICE Chicago Removes Former NFL Player, Criminal Illegal Alien From Kenya," ICE.gov, July 25, 2026.
• Fox News, "Exclusive: ICE Removes Former NFL Player Daniel Ogama Adongo After Visa Overstay, Criminal Record," July 25, 2026.
• Kyle Becker, "Former NFL Player Was Just Deported – ICE Is Done Playing Games," RedState, July 25, 2026.
• Fox59/NewsNation, "Ex-NFL, Kenyan Rugby Player Daniel Adongo Deported by ICE," July 25, 2026.
• House Budget Committee, "The Cost of Illegal Immigration to Taxpayers," 2024.
• Matt Vespa, "Here's an Update on How the ICE Deportations Are Going," Townhall, July 21, 2026.
• U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "DHS Sets the Stage for Another Historic, Record-Breaking Year Under President Trump," DHS.gov, January 20, 2026.